


But I’ve Got Promises to Keep and Miles to Go Before I Sleep

by catlike



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Gotham (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Pining, They still love each other, a decade apart is nothing for people like them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:08:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21837967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catlike/pseuds/catlike
Summary: Selina Kyle is twenty-nine and she’s trying not to think of the boy from her past.Except she is. Today, the nameBruce Wayneruns through her mind over and over again, an unending symphony of her subconscious, and she’d like to pretend she doesn’t know why, or what today means, but she does:It’s the anniversary of the night it all happened.As of today, it’s been sixteen years since Bruce became a part of her life, sixteen years since they both watched his parents die in that alley, and although Selina’s barely spoken to Bruce since he’s been back, though there’s anger and sadness and a decade of unspoken things between them, all those years ago she once made a promise that she’d be there whenever he needed her.And she’s never broken that promise.
Relationships: Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 13
Kudos: 96





	But I’ve Got Promises to Keep and Miles to Go Before I Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> “Selina will always be there for Bruce, even when he doesn’t think she is.” - Camren Bicondova

Selina Kyle is twenty-nine and she’s trying not to think of the boy from her past.

Except she is. Today, the name _Bruce Wayne_ runs through her mind over and over again, an unending symphony of her subconscious, and she’d like to pretend she doesn’t know why, or what today means, but she does:

It’s the anniversary of the night it all happened.

As of today, it’s been sixteen years since Bruce became a part of her life, sixteen years since they both watched his parents die in that alley, and although Selina’s barely spoken to Bruce since he’s been back, though there’s anger and sadness and a decade of unspoken things between them, all those years ago she once made a promise that she’d be there whenever he needed her.

And she’s never broken that promise.

Selina would like to think that Bruce no longer factors into her actions, but the thing is, ever since she was there in that alley, there’s something inside her that’s been protective of Bruce, like he’s one of her stray cats she looks out after. So she feels the urge to check in on him, materialize in the manor like she once did when she was a kid, when she knew she was always welcomed and he’d always be waiting for her. Selina knows that theoretically, she still can find a way into the manor. Breaking into Wayne Manor is like riding a bike, after all, you never really forget how.

But she doesn’t know if Bruce would want to see her, doesn’t know what she’d say to him anyway. She can leap from roof to roof with unmatched grace and land on her feet as skillfully as any cat, but she’s not good at things like this, not with people and relationships, and especially not with feelings that are somehow both as fragile and sharp as splintered glass. It’s not like she can help it, not like she’s been given chances to learn. She can count on one hand the number of people she’s ever truly trusted, who she’s loved and who have loved her back, and in the end, in one way or another, each one of them have left her.

But as hardened and cynical as Selina is and despite everything that tells her she shouldn’t, she still cares about him and about what today is. She can’t not care. She’s tried before, once, to say she didn’t, while she sat in a club and looked Bruce in the eyes and cried, the guilt and darkness inside eating her alive. But he hadn’t believed her then, even when she’d tried to convince him as much as she’d convinced herself.

(“You know me?” she’d asked, more like a challenge than a question, everything about her ready to fight.

“Yes,” he’d answered, without hesitating, without even having to think about it, like knowing her was just a fact like knowing that rain fell and stars burned.

And the thing that she hated most about it was that he had been _right_.)

So she can admit now that that night was one of the worst nights of her life, just like how she knows it was one of the worst ones of his. When she thinks about it, she still feels guilt crawl up her throat, feels compelled to think about how she should have done things differently, which is why she’d rather not think about it at all. But it’s seared into her memory whether she likes it or not, and in her mind she can still hear the echo of the bullets being fired from the gun, hear the sound of pearls falling one by one. She can remember the funeral too, remember how she’d never seen anyone look so broken, recall how she watched, uninvited and unnoticed, feeling her eyes sting and her lungs burn as she stared at the twin wooden coffins.

Bruce never even knew she was there then, and he’ll never know now. But she’s always been better with distance anyway, better with keeping people at arm’s length rather than holding them close. So she’ll care about him now like how she cared about him then: watchful but cautious, checking in unnoticed, keeping guard over him even if Bruce doesn’t know it, just like he’s one of her strays.

She has a promise to keep, after all.

#

Bruce doesn’t need to look at a calendar to know what today is.

It’s like his subconscious is always counting down to it, warning him that there’s no possible way to avoid the day, and each year he thinks that maybe, _just maybe_ this time it'll be easier.

But it never is.

Sometimes grief is romanticized. Bruce thinks that maybe that’s the only way some people can keep living, is to paint over their scars and pretend that the agony is something poetic. But Bruce knows the truth. Grief is not pretty. It’s not poetic. It’s like feeling you’re dying over and over again, except the curse is you _don’t_ , you just keep living with the pain. Like he’s doing right now as he watches the scene in the alley play out in his memory, like a movie that he can’t stop, and each time it happens he tries to figure out what he could’ve done to have made it all turn out differently.

He still hasn’t found a solution.

But the thing is, he knows he's not the only one who’s reliving it all today, not the only person being forced to remember what they’d rather forget, because the terrible handful of minutes in that alley is something him and Selina both share, just like how guilt is too.

It still kills him to remember the look on her face, in those final days before he left Gotham behind, as she stood in front of him in the fading light and said, “ _I should have done something_.” He never wanted her to feel guilty, doesn’t _ever_ want her to feel guilty, and it’s almost desperate, how much he aches to see her again, if only for a minute, just to know how she’s doing today as much for her sake as for his.

The truth is, he still loves her. Ten years apart from her has done nothing to change that fact. It had all seemed so inevitable when he was a kid, that it was always going to be her and him. And though he’s grown older and more silent and stoic and so much less likely to wear his heart on his sleeve and blurt out his feelings like he once did when he was fifteen, he knows it’s still true. Knows it’s still her who he’s connected to like no one else. It’s always been her, he thinks. It’s always _going_ to be her.

He glances at the window of his study, almost as if he expects that - if only he waits long enough - Selina will show up on the ledge, just like she used to, with a smile on her face and a sarcastic quip on her lips. But the ledge remains empty, and all he sees through the window is a sky full of clouds, like rainfall’s only a breath away.

He doesn’t know where Selina is or how to find her, and they haven’t spoken in so long that Bruce doubts she wants to see him again. Their lives used to be all tangled up with each other, and it’s impossible to think of his past without thinking of her, but he doesn’t know what they are now, if they’re even anything at all.

 _You won’t see Selina_ , he tells himself, _not unless she drops out of the sky,_ so putting the thought from his mind, he rises and puts on his coat.

Because even if he can’t see her, there’s still someplace he feels he needs to be tonight.

#

The color of the sky is dark and deep, like it’s warning the world it’s about to storm, and Selina knows that soon the sky will be filled with rain and the rooftops will be slick with water, and she’s better off staying inside, patching up the holes in her roof and trying to forget about the boy she once knew.

And yet she finds herself outside, beneath the grey clouds and black sky, running toward the alley anyway.

She’s not sure why, exactly. It’s almost like something’s calling her there, demanding she stand in the place it all started, and she doesn’t believe in flimsy things like fate, but she does believe in trusting her instincts, and her instincts tell her _go,_ so she keeps running, jumping from one rooftop to the next until she lands on one of the two buildings next to the alley.

That’s when she sees she’s not alone.

Bruce is there, over on the building next to the one she’s on. She can see his silhouette on the edge of the roof.

Of _course_ he’s there, she thinks. She should have known that the same thing that called out to her would call out to him too. That night shaped them both - connected them both - and there’s guilt and grief and so many unexplainable tiny things that tie them together that it should be no surprise that they’ve both ended up in the same place on the same night.

So, no, she shouldn’t feel thrown that he’s there, but she somehow still is, and she finds that her breath catches somewhere in the space beneath her breastbone as she takes him in from a distance. She can’t help but remember him from that night, so small and so young and crying because his world had just shattered. She had no idea back then that he’d become someone she cared about.

No idea she’d fall in love with him.

No idea he’d leave her.

That train of thought is a dangerous one, she knows, one that can take her to things she can’t say out loud and feelings she won’t admit to even in the silence of her own mind, and she doesn’t want to deal with any of _that_ , so she shakes her head and shoves it all away.

Before she can change her mind and tell herself it’s a bad idea, that she’s better off keeping her distance and watching from afar, she finds herself running toward the edge, and so she leaps into the sky and over the long drop below, landing on the building Bruce is on, and she watches as Bruce turns toward her, surprise written across his face, dark eyes taking her in in a way that feels all too familiar.

“Selina?”

“Who else?” she says flippantly, because having his eyes on her like that, having his full focus on her presence is making her heart beat faster than jumping from the rooftop did and she’s trying to bury it beneath a layer of sarcasm and a roll of her eyes. “Nice to see you in normal clothes instead of that bat thing. Never can take you seriously when you’re wearing it.”

Bruce doesn't rise to her bait, he just stands there, eyes still sweeping over her. He somehow looks both sad and hopeful, and there’s something else there too, something in his gaze that she can’t quite put words to - but she gets the feeling that he’s looking at her like she’s an illusion that might disappear at any moment.

She’s not sure she can really blame him. She almost feels like disappearing herself, dropping off the side of the building and fading into the night, like her presence had never been anything more than a trick of the light, but there’s something stronger inside that keeps her feet planted where they are.

Still, he’s so quiet, so she asks, “What?”

“Nothing,” he answers, slightly shaking his head. “It’s just like you dropped out of the sky.”

He says it like it means something, and maybe to him it does, and maybe it explains why he’s staring at her like he is, but if it’s significant, Selina has no idea why, so she doesn’t know how to reply, and looks off into the distance instead, watching the pale plumes of smoke from the vents on the roof rise to mix with the mist and fog in the sky.

“Selina,” Bruce tries again, and she pretends she hasn’t missed the way her name sounds when he says it. “What are you doing here?”

She shrugs like she doesn’t know and it doesn’t matter, like she doesn't feel a sharp stab of guilt as her eyes land on the fire escape she hid on, that she did nothing but _watch_ on. “I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d stop by. What are you doing here?”

His eyes flicker down below to the alley, and Selina recognizes the look on his face from when she was younger, the look that says he’s lost in the maze of his mind, desperately trying to figure out where he went wrong. Like if he figures it out now, it’ll somehow bring his parents back.

But it won’t.

“Bruce,” Selina says, his name coming out from her lips a little louder and sharper than she means it to, because she’s remembering the twelve-year-old boy with the world on his shoulders and grief in his eyes who once told her that he should have done _something_. “You can spend the rest of your life in this alley trying to think your way out, but it doesn’t change the fact that there was nothing you could have done.”

A soft, light rain’s starting to dust the rooftop, but Selina makes no move to get out of it, she’s too busy staring at the look on Bruce’s face, the look that tells her that she was right, that he _had_ been replaying the scene in his head, trying to figure out what he could’ve done differently.

She knows that game all too well, knows it’s as painful as it is pointless to play.

Knows she’s felt compelled to play it today herself.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says, softer now, quieter, her voice like the gentle rain that’s falling around them.

“It wasn’t yours either,” Bruce says in return.

Selina shuts her eyes for a second, feels the raindrops cling to her eyelashes as she exhales, and when she opens them again, she sees he’s still watching her, like he’s hoping that this time she believes him, that she doesn’t have to carry around any guilt. He knows her too well, she thinks. He always has, and ten years of silence between them hasn’t done anything to change that fact. And underneath her thick armor on the surface and behind the high walls of her heart, despite the distance that’s been between them and any anger she’s felt, here’s what she knows:

This is who they are and who they always will be: two people who know each other, two people who need each other.

“Come here,” Selina says without thinking, and then her breath catches as she realizes what she’s just said.

The both of them hold their breath, silent and still in the falling rain as they stare at each other. They both know that those words were the last thing she ever said to him on the final night they were together, on the night he decided to leave.

“Selina,” Bruce says, his voice soft and sad and barely audible above the sound of rain hitting the rooftop. “That night, I - ” he stops, starts again. “You should know that I - ”

“Don’t,” Selina says. She really doesn’t want to hear it. Bruce has never been good with words, in her opinion, and she’s frankly never been good at listening to him. But that’s never what they’ve been about, anyhow. There’s an unspoken connection the two of them have that somehow lasts and lasts and _lasts._

“Save your speech, Bruce, I never pay attention them, anyways,” Selina says, one corner of her mouth quirking up for a second before faltering. “Just...come here.”

She reaches toward him, her hand out like a peace offering, and he hesitates for half a heartbeat, and then he’s there in her arms, and he lets out a breath he’s been holding that sounds like an exhale of tired relief, as if he’s finally found sanctuary in a place he thought might offer none.

Selina’s wearing her gloves with the sharp, curved claws at the tips of her fingers that have made so many cringe, and yet Bruce doesn’t even flinch as she reaches up toward him, and there’s something in her that finds solace in the fact that after all this time, he still trusts her completely. She moves her hand to the nape of his neck, pale silver claws resting lightly against his rain-dusted dark hair as she brings his head down to rest against hers.

They stand there, forehead to forehead, eyes closed, rain falling around them, just breathing, just _being_. Selina can feel raindrops sliding into her curls and soaking into her clothes, but she can’t bring herself to move or care. She closes her eyes, feels the steady rhythm of Bruce’s breathing and the calming cadence of his heartbeat, and there’s something about it - about him - that feels like coming _home_.

“Thank you,” Bruce murmurs quietly, “for being here today.”

He says it so softly, almost cautiously, and Selina understands, because she feels hesitant too, like this moment is fragile, like they need to be careful because this string that ties them together is something delicate that can blow away in the breeze. But, still, however delicate it may be, it’s _there_. And Selina doesn’t know how their dynamic works now, she knows it’s shifted like sand in an hourglass as they’ve grown older and she can’t say whether it’ll be better tomorrow or whether they’ll break apart yet again, but when it comes down to it, the facts are these:

Despite distance and disagreements, despite anything else thrown their way and no matter how many times the world rips them apart, they always find their way back to each other. And they’ll _keep_ finding each other, over and over again, no matter what happens. Because that’s the way the story goes.

Some people are just always meant to be in your life.

And so Selina promises again, just like she promised before:

“I will be here whenever you need me.”


End file.
